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Advocacy: for Evangelical Leaders

Description:This E_Tutorial explores the skills and concepts needed to understand and become an advocate. Advocacy involves the work completed by an individual or entity on behalf of one “side” in a conflict situation.

The problems brought to an advocate impact the life or lives of the individual, family members, or other members of the organization he/she represents. Common examples include domestic abuse victims, orphaned or estranged children, elder abuse victims. Other profession organizations provide advocacy; these include community counseling organizations and policy victims’ advocacy programs. Taking this course would be a good preparation for a more advanced training as an professional advocate or victims’ advocate in any capacity (privately or professionally).

Facilitation: Professional Problem-Solving with Churches and Professional Organizations

Description: This E-Tutorial explores the skills and concepts needed to complete a successful professional facilitation. Facilitation involves the established practice of facilitation techniques to assist groups, businesses, and professional organizations to resolve problems.

The problems brought to a facilitator impact all that are a part of the group, business, or organization. Common examples include disputes faced by community & civic organizations such as school boards, city councils, or county governing entities. Other groups who seek a professional facilitator include churches, businesses, clubs or unions. The course provides an overview of professional facilitation techniques with a single role-play at the end. Taking this course would be a good preparation for more advanced training as a professional facilitator.

Human Diversity in Education

Description: This E-Tutorial describes an exploration of different topics related to teaching, mentoring, counseling and working with an ever changing diverse, immigrant and multi-ethnic society.

E-Tutorial Goals: To develop appropriate practices for cultural competency for diverse communities. To incorporate best practices and gaining skills in intercultural communication and interaction in order to reach out to diverse, multi-ethnic and immigrant communities.

Identity, Immigration, and Citizenship

Description: This E-Tutorial explores the abundance of new scholarship on the evolution of citizenship in the United States. Ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and other scholars have studied the ever-changing criteria (race, identity, class, culture, religion) that have produced such categories as “citizen,” “resident aliens,” “nationals,” and “illegal aliens.” One of the purposes of these readings is to encourage us to understand the Latino/a identity and citizenship in a comparative frame work. The emphasis would be related to identity, citizenship, race, and human experience in the context of cultural migration.

Moral Leadership

Description: Today's leaders face challenges not only to their skill, but to their personal character as well. Authenticity in spirit as well as actions - being able to "walk the talk" - is a critical component in leadership that helps others become empowered leaders themselves. In this course, you will learn about the moral dimensions and ethical challenges surrounding the practice of values-based leadership by exploring such topics as the moral challenges of power and self-interest; public and private morality of leaders; leadership and the common good; and moral leadership and culture. You will share your reflections in a weekly 500 word essay, and conclude with a summary paper of about 3000 words synthesizing course readings with a self-analysis on your own identity as moral leader.

Prophetic Leadership

“But poets should exert a double vision; should have eyes to see near things

As comprehensively as if afar they took their point of sight,

And distant things as intimately deep as if they touched them.”

Like the poet, the prophet sees: the injustice inherent in the dominant culture, its effects on those who suffer under it, and the vision to “nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us” (Brueggeman).

Characteristic of prophetic leadership is the passion for possibility: a hope born of compassion that enables the realization of our deepest selves to become free and full participants in the world. In this etutorial, students will explore the tasks of prophetic leadership, and reflect on their call to practice it in their ministry settings.

Public Witness and Community Partnership

Premise and Overview: This course provides an examination of different forms of religious engagement in the public square, different pathways of religious institutions’ (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) influence in public, political and community life, and different partnerships forged creatively that cross “sacred/secular” divisions in order to address social problems, foster societal transformation, and strengthen the common good. Through exposure to historical and current examples of religious institutions engaging with social challenges in settings around the world, the course equips students with theological frameworks and effective strategies for public witness and community partnerships for the sake of societal transformation.

Spiritual Transformation and Social Change

Description: In his preface to the text for this course, Robert Egan asks the question, what is the relationship between the mystical and the political dimensions of religious existence? In this course, you will explore theoretical and practical perspectives on the subject through the lens of St. Teresa of Avila, Ignatian spirituality of service, the religious tradition of African-American women, and contemporary social justice figures.

Social Entrepreneurship as a “Gospel Compatible” Business Model

To what extent might social entrepreneurship be a constructive model for the integration of ethical business and management practices and Christian faith values?

How might social enterprise allow the Church and business to partner in the resolution of intractable social problems with which social entrepreneurship is concerned?

The processes of globalization have resulted in both positive and negative outcomes for human beings and for the environment. Social entrepreneurship, as a constructive outcome of globalization, has its own particular niche within the global market economy. Social entrepreneurship is a phenomenon that has been steadily gaining ground in the past two decades. It is a dimension of entrepreneurial activity aimed at generating social value and creating sustainable change rather than focusing on producing monetary profit as its primary goal. Social entrepreneurship, at its heart, is highly compatible with the values, beliefs, and goals of the Christian Church in its mission to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. It has tremendous potential to be an inspiring exemplar of what it means to live out the Gospels.

Transcending Cycles of Violence

Course DESCRIPTION:This Course explores the skills needed to break cycles of violence and promote peace. The group behavior patterns that lead to social conflict are explored with an emphasis on methods to break long standing cycles of violence and transcend patterns of ineffective functioning that has perpetuated conflict. Dr. John Paul Lederach’s groundbreaking writings lead the field in creating the stimulus for changes that will stimulate peace.

Individuals promoting peace are uniquely posed (within every type of cultural community) to lead and inspire social groups to transcend cycles of violence. Strong leadership is what is needed to enable congregates and communities to begin new pathways of peaceful interaction. In today’s world of rising crime, gang membership, and terrorist threats, - the skill to break and transcend “cycles of violence” is sorely needed. This course will provide students with the techniques needed to lead communities away from conflict cycles and toward the light of a more healthy and positive peace, where once there existed only violence.

This prescription sums up life in the Spirit: A faithful disposition of heart, a practice of right relating, and an orientation toward the Holy One. In this context, justice and compassion are cornerstones of the spiritual life and the foundations of social transformation.

As spiritual values, these are understood in the context of covenants of mutuality, inclusion and egalitarianism that foster right ordering of relationships. As transformative practices, they encompass a dialectical relationship between individuals and society, within which is an awareness of ways in which the dominant culture could be reordered to reflect life-enhancing values and just social systems.

In this etutorial, we will explore how these virtues cooperate in an engaged spirituality by performing a social analysis of a situation of oppression and injustice with a critical and compassionate eye, proposing solutions which are transformative, life-giving and just.

Transformational Servant Leadership

Course Description: Robert Greenleaf noted that the servant-leader is servant first. His or her desire to lead comes from a desire to serve, and is manifested in the care s/he takes in ensuring that others grow into greater freedom, wisdom, health, and empowered leadership. Transformational leadership invites the leader to engage in a process of service that lifts leader and those they serve to a higher level of being and acting that are the bases for personal conversion and social transformation. Both nurture the seeds of a vision that leaders and our society not only long for, but can realize.

Each week, you’ll read essays from various thought leaders and practitioners in the field of transformational and servant leadership practices. You’ll then have an opportunity to reflect on how these can inform and inspire your own leadership practice by writing a 500 – 750 word essay each week. The tutorial concludes with a 3000 word paper synthesizing course ideas with your personal experience as servant leader.

Vocation and Call

“The grammar of transformational change is the invitational question, not the declarative answer.” These words from the Fetzer Institute form the structure for our exploration into the connection between the experience of personal transformation and its relationship to the practice of transformational leadership: What would it mean for you as a leader to cultivate the inner life? What would your leadership arising from your core of spiritual groundedness look like?

You’ll reflect on these questions by writing a weekly 600 – 1000 word essay, relating the readings to prompts inviting you to explore various aspects of your interior experience of spiritual conversion and leadership praxis. The tutorial will culminate with a substantive final essay that consists of, and builds on, your weekly reflections – informed by your learning and my comments on these - on the relationship between your personal spirituality and your leadership practice.